Making Your Website Suck
In a world where we rely on trends to guide us to sucess, there are trends in web/graphic design that suck. It's ironic to say that these horrible and frivolous trends are still evident and popular in many of today's websites. This little guide wil help you avoid the worst of the worst in trends. Following trends does not neccesarily make you unoriginal - if you are able to build and expand effectively then you will be original.
Seizing CSS
We've all seen it - from bright, unreadable minicule text to cluttered mash-ups of navigation bars and headers. The CSS should not be used entirely to bring out the colours of the layout. The CSS should only be used to flatter the theme of the layout, which in most cases is a header or banner image. Therefore, you should
not use all the colours in your banner image in the CSS. What you should be using are colours that are bold and contrast well with the background. And please, keep your text to a 12px minimum - please I'm begging you! Also, do not overdose or underdose on letter-spacing and text height.
Splashing Enter Pages
Splash/enter pages should
only be used if your site is offered in multi-languages or if your site has distinct networks. It's really annoying to see people have that page when clearly they don't need it. What's more annoying is that people make it difficult to find the link to enter the main page. No one needs to waste their time searching for the proper link on the splash/enter page - just because it's trendy it doesn't mean it's useful.
Knotty Navigation
So, everyone reading this is probably used to these similar main navigation links:
You
Me
WWW
Clear
Basically, someone who hasn't been submerged in trendy website propaganda will think this about the links (slightly over-exaggerated for teaching purposes):
You - Who me?
Me - Me? I thought I was you!
WWW - Aren't we already on the internet?
Clear - Is this how I leave this horrible and confusing website? *A few moments later* Darn, I'm back where I started...
You don't want to confuse your visitors! You want to make accessing your website as easy as possible. Although the links above may look simple because of their lack of letters, it doesn't mean that it's clear and concise. Here's an example of what a main navigation should look like:
Visitor Content (or Visitor)
About the Owner (or Owner)
About the Site (or Site)
Homepage (or Home)
Not so CuteNews
Just because everyone seems to have it, it doesn't mean it's any good. CuteNews = spam, server hacking, many error messages, and bitching about CuteNews. Because CuteNews doesn't use a MySQL server there isn't any guarantee for the flat-files to be reliable and safe. Besides, their website doesn't look like it's been updated for a while - therefore, you gullible CuteNews users are using an old and unupdated script. Get away from it now! Alternatives: FanUpdate, WordPress, and even HaloScan for you lazy folks!
Defective Graphics
If you are going to serve graphics to your visitors, don't give them graphics made with little or no little effort. Just because your site contains many premade graphics, it doesn't mean your site is great. Making many graphics to just have more visitor content is shameful! If you want to satistfy your visitors, give them satisfying graphics!
Helpless Tutorials
I am sick and tired of looking at stolen tutorials, period. If you don't want to take the time to educate your visitors, then there is no point in having tutorials on your website. Another thing that really upsets me are tutorials that are putting out incorrect information. Come on, if your gonna copy and paste, copy and paste properly! Put some time to learn about things like HTML or CSS, then you'll be able to properly and correctly educate others. Just because you have a website it doesn't mean you are entitled to great tutorials or awesomeness, in general.
_____ Credits (man, I was on a roll with those titles!)
Oh mon dieu (that's French for OMG)! Where to begin?... Credit, all your sources - that means your host, widgets, scripts, programs, etc...! It is really disrespectul of people to want their visitors to credit when they obviously haven't been doing the same. Just because you put tiny hearts or "x"'s at the bottom of your page with some credit links, it doesn't mean you've properly credit anyone! Geez! All you have to do is create a designated page called "Credits" and put all the links to your sources... I thought everyone knew that?!
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